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Friday, July 9, 2010

Day 5--Bridegroom of Blood & Moses' Member

Today's reading was a lot to ingest. The entire life of Moses, the plagues, the Exodus out of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea...

I can't unpack all that in one tiny blog post. People smarter than I have devoted their entire lives to studying this portion of Scripture.

I can, however, say that these things stood out to me:

Exodus 4:12--Now Go! I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say. That's what God told Moses the moment before Moses argued (again!) that he wasn't capable of leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and the moment before "God's anger burned against him." (Note: Pissing off God is NOT the way to go about things.)

Then, there was Exodus 4:24-26 where God wants to kill Moses. Really? I've read through the Bible at least a half dozen times and totally missed this.

On the journey back, as they camped for the night, God met Moses and would have killed him but Zipporah took a flint knife and cut off her son's foreskin, and touched Moses' member with it. She said, "Oh! You're a bridegroom of blood to me!" Then God let him go. She used the phrase "bridegroom of blood" because of the circumcision

So Moses' wife circumcised their son and "touched Moses' member" with the foreskin?? I needed a little more explanation for this passage. There's a lot of speculation out there, but I found one article that got into the language of the phrase "Bridegroom of blood,"

Basically, it boils down to euphemisms. The Hebrew word for "feet" is also a euphemisms for "genitals." It seems most translations prefer to not pay attention to such things of language (which is why I chose the highly debatable version of the Bible, The Message, to quote from here.) So she she was actually saying (and symbolizing) was, "This blood will protect you." And that makes a lot more sense than what the other Bible scholars have been saying.

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Then there's the fact that the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart again and again. Which makes me wonder, since God is the same as he always has been, has he hardened my heart, or those around me, to carry through with more glorious plans?

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Exodus 12:2--Can you believe that God started time over for the Hebrews before they even left Egypt?!

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And one of my favorite verses in the entire Bible. Exodus 14:14:

God will fight the battle for you. And you? You keep your mouths shut!"

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Finally, pay attention to the significance of the 14th day of the month in your reading.